With The Last Manly Man, the fourth Robin Hudson mystery, Sparkle Hayter joins the ranks of successful serial crime writers. While Hayter’s work is uniquely picaresque and far less formulaic than the average female-authored mystery, her serial contains many of the usual she-sleuth gimmicks. The heroine, Robin Hudson, is alluring and sexual: a role model without vices. She has the obligatory kitty cat and erstwhile lover, she is bizarrely impervious to physical pain, and cracks wise when the going gets tough.

Hayter’s mysteries are less Sue Grafton (P is for Potboiler) than Barbara Wilson (the author of The Dog Collar Murders): Hudson is a politically motivated, accidental PI – picture a younger, more urbane Jessica Fletcher. Hudson’s politics, however, are also constructed as accidental. In The Last Manly Man, the tabloid television reporter narrator reveals “one of the most important management lessons I learned along the way: Pass the buck to someone else.” Hayter employs a similar strategy via Hudson, by raising complex political issues (gender relationships, animal activism, corporate, and capitalist misconduct) through characters other than the heroine as a way of circumventing definitive commentary.

The Last Manly Man is a smooth and enjoyable read, densely plotted, and highly eventful. Hudson’s current adventures include a corpse in a fedora, a women’s convention, vegan radicals, nefarious gender, and chemical warfare, and a handful of stolen “horny” chimps. Hayter wastes very little time with traditional literary conventions such as descriptive prose, setting, and character development. The book is amusing, if graspingly so at times, and endearingly sex-centred. Hudson is adamantly erotic, although she never has a chance to get laid, given the rocket-pace of her detective work.

Hayter’s strongest work here involves her attempt to articulate manliness through a “Shane Come Back” feminist model: this politic speaks to the failure of separatism, and re-evaluates men’s long reviled roles in women’s lives. It is “that mysterious good thing that men have that makes (us) overlook all sorts of annoying shit” that Hudson seeks out and nearly finds, all the while rejoicing “Vive la difference, hubba hubba.”